While Dr Evil might power his supercomputer using the volcano on his island base, the idea has been suggested as a way of sorting out the world’s battery woes.

At the moment most of the world’s lithium used in these batteries comes from Australia and Chile, but it is now thought that a better source would be supervolcanoes.

Stanford boffins say that it is important to identify lithium resources in the US so that supply does not rely on single companies or countries in a way that makes us subject to economic or political manipulation. Nothing is worse than an Aussie with his arm behind your back giving you a Chinese burn.

Lithium will be more important once the US gets rid of its current president who believes that global warming is a myth and the world looks for safer means of power than sticking carbon into the atmosphere. Solar and wind power needs good batteries and that means a reasonable lithium supply.

Professor Gail Mahood said that we are going to have to use electric vehicles and large storage batteries to decrease our carbon footprint.

The Stanford team has come up with a new technique to detect lithium in volcanic lakes that have appeared in calderas – holes in the ground that were created when supervolcanoes erupted, displacing huge quantities of lava.

Lithium, found in the volcanic deposits, has been drawn out into the lake over thousands of years, and gathered as clay in the lake. But some lakes are more lithium-rich than others, depending on the original magma content, and the key is being able to identify which ones.

“Because lithium is a very volatile element, it is extremely difficult to measure,” Tom Benson, lead author of the study, says. “You can't simply measure the whole rock chemical composition of a volcanic rock, like volcanologists typically do.”

Instead, the team worked out a way to identify how much lithium was in the lake. By extracting tiny blobs of magma that had been trapped in crystals, heating them up and quenching them, Benson could identify the lithium content in the magma.

The study was based in the US, but the whole world will be facing similar challenges in the future. For example, in the UK, “the grid-connected energy storage market is expected to expand from total installed capacity of 3 GW at the end of 2016 to 28 GW by 2022,” Marek Kubik, a market director for energy storage systems at AES, says.

The lithium deposits I discuss in this manuscript only occur in old, dormant volcanoes where the caldera lake has drained and exposed the old lake sediments.

AMD has promised that it will roll out a driver update will will sort out the power issues with the RX 480 by Thursday.

For those who came in late AMD's new RX 480 GPU had the potential to suck the power out of a PC until its motherboard melted. No motherboard actually did catch fire, but certainly the power draw was breaking all safety agreements.

AMD was suprised by the fault as it appeared to have not been spotted in its testing. It was only noticed by reviewers who were doing the same sorts of tests that AMD should have done itself in getting the GPU to the shops.

The driver will fix two issues. It will shift some of the power load off of the PCIe Graphics (PEG) slot connector and bring power consumption within PCIe spec. This would potentially put the 6-in connector over spec, but the vast majority of PSUs can manage that.

That is suposed to fix the main problem, but there is an optional solution which reduces the total power consumption of the card and keeps the PEG slot and 6-pin power connector below their respective limits.This will really mess up the performance but will be the most standards-compliant solution. It is beign called the "compatibility" mode. AMD insists that this will have a "minimal performance impact" but we guess a new range of benchmarks will tells us if that is accurate.

A spokes AMD said that the “compatibility” UI toggle will be found in the Global Settings menu of Radeon Settings. This toggle is “off” by default.

Meanwhile AMD is also touting some slight performance optimisations in this driver so there is a possibility that they have managed to offset any performance loss.

AMD said that the performance improvents of the driver will be about three per cent on some game titles

"These optimisations are designed to improve the performance of the Radeon RX 480, and should substantially offset the performance impact for users who choose to activate the “compatibility” toggle," AMD said.

Since AMD’s new RX480 card has launched there have been reports that it seems to have issues with the PCI Express slot.

The source of the rumours are Tom’s Hardware which found that the RX480 they had received for review drew 86W through the PCIE slot. That’s 11W above the maximum 75W specification required to meet compliance.

The story has gained some currency across the world wide wibble normally reported by confessed Nvidia fanboys desperate to prove that AMD really has not got a winner with this chip.

AMD’s Senior VP and Chief Architect Raja Koduri was a bit puzzled when asked about the rumour. Mostly because PCIE compliance is one of the basic tests before a card goes out. He said that the RX480 passed its testing, but he was taking the reviews seriously.

“However we have received feedback from some of the reviewers on high current observed on PCIE in some cases. We are looking into these scenarios as we speak and reproduce these scenarios internally. Our engineering team is fully engaged.”

It is possible that the review card was faulty or something went wrong with the testing. Reviewers normally get cards that can flash the BIOS to use either 4GB or 8GB of VRAM so card makers don’t have to send a pair of cards for testing.

AMD also points out that the RX480 met ‘Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group’ (PCI-SIG) compliance testing. So it passed external industry testing as well as internal tests.However there do seem to be a few GPUs exhibiting anomalous behaviour, and we’ve been in touch with these reviewers for a few days to better understand their test configurations to see how this could be possible, that post says.

“We will have more on this topic soon as we investigate, but it’s worth reminding people that only a very small number of hundreds of RX 480 reviews worldwide encountered this issue.”

So far we have only heard review problems for Tom’s Hardware in fact the card has had reasonable reviews elsewhere so it could be a faulty card.

But it is weird how this story is being shaped into a “card is broken story” by the tech press. The level of smear and spin stories that are being put out there at the moment is on the rise, from both sides of the Nvidia and AMD fence and it is getting very difficult to get to the bottom of any of them.

It looks like the Nvidia and AMD wars are turning so nasty that it is going to be increasingly difficult to trust any industry deep throats for a while. It looks like placing stories in the media is going to be part of the industry stock and trade. It is not just AMD being hit. There was one which is doing the rounds claiming Nvidia could not make enough of its latest chips because of a fault with TSMC. It specifically said that suppliers were only getting 20 cards if they were lucky. However it is clear that some suppliers have a 1000 or so.

A power shortage at a key Samsung plant might cause a shortage of flash chips.

If you believe Digitimes, the power outage at Samsung's Xian, China fab has disrupted the company's flash production raising concerns that supply of the memory might fall short of demand in the second half of 2016.

The lights have been off for a few days, but Samsung thinks it will have everything going in a few more days. It lost 10,000 wafers during the cut and officially claims it will have a "minimal impact" on the market.

But it appears that there are concerns about tight supply arising from Samsung's production shortfall among downstream module makers and distributors.

Samsung's Xian plant is a 12-inch wafer fab engaged in the manufacture of 3D NAND flash memory and suddenly those selling NAND stopped quoting their prices.

Some of this was because they wanted to clarify the extent of the damage, according to sources at Taiwan-based distributors but others are holding onto inventory believing there will be shortage. If there is a Flash panic, those who hold onto the product can raise their prices. Already the supply of NAND flash is tight so any short-fall could make a difference.

It appears that IBM’s Power system, which had been largely written off, is back from the dead and Biggish Blue’s attempt to resurrect it might have paid off.

OK, Intel’s x86 is still everywhere and Power still has a way to go, but Computerworld spotted in the small print of IBM’s financial results that it had its first growth for Power systems in four years.

Power systems revenue climbed 4 percent from a year earlier, or eight percent adjusted for the strong US dollar. On that basis, sales were up for all of 2015.

The reason it is back is IBM’s shift to Linux as an alternative to AIX, its proprietary Unix software. The new Power8 processor makes it easier for clients to port Linux applications from x86.

Biggish Blue opened the platform to third parties. Under the OpenPower initiative, other companies can now design and sell Power servers and processors under IBM’s license. IBM is adding more components to its systems from third parties like Nvidia and Mellanox.

This allowed Power to be changed to handle modern workloads like big data and cloud applications. IBM even released a new line of low-cost Linux servers that customers can order online.

What they appear to be doing is filling a gap that many thought would be taken by ARM servers. However these have been a little slow to arrive.

For IBM getting rid of x86 meant that it now has a smaller but more profitable hardware business. For all of 2013, IBM's hardware division reported a loss of $507 million on $15 billion in revenue. Last year, it made a profit of $604 million on $8.0 billion in revenue

The cunning plan is to install electric generating equipment at its factories or even building its own power plant.

Apparently, the company's electricity bill will go up by 50 per cent over the next ten years as it moves to more-advanced technologies.

Taiwan is already facing power shortage problems and TSMC is worried that its plans could be stuffed up.

TSMC has asked Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) and government-owned Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) about the feasibility of building its own power generators and related regulatory matters.

According to Digitimes, companies can set up power generating equipment for use at their own factory sites, but the law has to be revised to allow TSMC to build its own power plant.

TSMC previously pointed out that it does not necessarily need nuclear power unless there is no alternative. We really hope that quote does not mean that TSMC is considering going nuclear.

Boffins working at the University of Washington have developed a new technique for drawing enough power from standard Wi-Fi signals to run a camera or a recharge a fitness tracker.

The move is great for the Internet of things because you will not need to have batteries in the gear, just a decent signal. But it could be a scary way of meaning that observation will be everywhere rather fast.

In a paper with the catchy title, Powering the Next Billion Devices with Wi-Fi , PhD candidate Vamsi Talla, documents the team's experiments to extract a minimum operational threshold of 300 millivolts across the as-yet unlicensed ISM band which Wi-Fi uses.

This had to be done without disrupting the quality of conventional Wi-Fi data transmission or degrading the efficiency of existing small networks.

Eventually the group was able to extract the necessary voltage using Wi-Fi chipsets with ranges of 20 and 17 feet, and also to recharge nickel-metal hydride lithium-ion coin-cell batteries at a range of up to 28 feet.

An initial Asus RT-AC68U router was used, which operates at 2.437 GHz outputting 23dBm from each of its three 4.04dBi gain antennas.

The biggest problem was the irregular nature of Wi-Fi transmissions, which use a single channel in bursts that are not sufficient to constitute an adequate charging stream. This was fixed by jury-rigging a new router from three Atheros AR9580 ('Peacock') chipsets, programming it to broadcast noise in between data bursts to provide two parallel transmission channels to ensure that data rates were unaffected.

By using the hacked Atheros gear it was possible to get usable recharging distances of 20-30 feet, and could sometimes recharge throw a brick wall.

The scary technology was the security camera that the group was able to charge wirelessly. Sure it was not the greatest as it could only produce 174 x 144 pixel black and white images at an energy cost of 10.4 milliJoules of energy per picture.

An attached low-leakage capacitor activates when charged to 3.1V, cutting out again on a drop to 2.4V, with images stored in 64kb of non-volatile ferroelectric RAM. It took an image every 35 minutes initially, and the addition of a wirelessly-rechargeable battery increased the workable router distance from 16 feet to just under 23 feet.

When they get these producing a useful snap at a distance they will be able to be everywhere because they will not need expensive cabling.

The paper concludes with broad visions for the possibility of PoWiFi not only in the new Internet of Things, but also in IoT as it emerges in the developing world.

Biggish blue is upgrading its Power chips so that they can better compete with Intels Haswell-EX Xeon E7 v3 processors.

For those who came in late Chipzilla jacked up its Xeons by scaling them scaling up to eight sockets using Intel's on-chip NUMA links. Biggish Blue has replied by expanding its high-end Power E880 machines, which scale out to a maximum of 16 sockets and 16 TB of main memory.

In an interesting article in the Platform http://www.theplatform.net/2015/05/11/power8-iron-to-take-on-four-socket-xeons/ , IBM accidently leaked details of these high-end boxes at its Edge2015. It was supposed to save them until its Las Vegas this week.

The final machine to be added to the Power8-based Power Systems lineup from Big Blue is the Power E850, and it is a four-socket machine that is aimed at HP, Dell, Oracle, Fujitsu, NEC, and others that employ Intel's Xeon E7-4800 v3 CPUs, which similarly support four-way NUMA clustering in their hardware.

The Power E850 includes some capacity-on-demand features that up until now have only been available on larger Power Systems machines. With capacity on demand, IBM ships a box loaded with processors and main memory and allows customers to activate it as needed either permanently or temporarily on a daily or monthly basis with utility pricing.

The base Power E850 system ships with two processors and a full memory complement (based on 16 GB, 32 GB, or 64 GB memory sticks) as a base, and customers active Power8 cores and memory in 1 GB increments.

The chips are based on IBM's "Murano" dual-chip module, which puts two linked half-cored Power8 chips into a single Power8 socket. The smaller chip has a high yield than a larger chip and IBM's 22 nanometer copper/SOI process does not have the volume advantages of Intel's 22 nanometer Tri-Gate process, which is used to make the Haswell-EX Xeon E7 v3 processors.

DCM variants of the Power8 chips have more I/O capacity on their PCI-Express controllers, at 48 lanes per second instead of the 32 lanes per socket that are used in the single-chip variants of the Power8 chips used in the high-end Power E870 and Power E880 systems, which respectively scale to eight and sixteen sockets in a single image.

Quanta has announced that it will ship new low-power cloud server based on Intel's upcoming Atom processor code-named Centerton. In a statement the company said that the server would ship by the end of this year and will be dubbed the Stratos S900-X31A.

It is the second server to be announced based on the 64-bit Centerton chip. The maker of expensive printer ink HP announced a new server as part of its Gemini server platform that will use Centerton, in June.

Atom processors are usually found in low-power laptops and tablets, and companies and are being touted as an alternative to ARM processors. Both ARM and Intel are also pushing their low power chips into the server market.

Quanta's microserver will have 24 or 48 nodes in a 3U chassis. It will consume less than 10 watts per node.

Intel's Centerton processor draws 6 watts of power, and the company next year plans to launch a new Atom server chip code-named Avoton, which will be made using the 22-nanometer process.